Her women are drawn with a knowledge that is apparently as minutely exact and is certainly as sympathetic. If I had to single out her most remarkable study in feminine temperament and psychology, I think I should say Joanna Godden; but her explicit interpretations of women are not so unusual as her understanding of men. She knows their businesses as thoroughly as she knows them. If, like Coalbran or Backfield, they are farmers and working on the land, she is not contented with vivid generalities but makes the varied, multifarious circumstance of farming and cattle raising, and the whole atmosphere and environment that has moulded their lives part of her story. When Monypenny devotes himself to the development of Tamarisk Town you are not asked to take anything for granted but are shown how he financed his scheme, acquired land, carried out his building operations, how the borough was formed, and the elections conducted—you follow the growth of the place through its various stages, and Monypenny’s own story grows with and through it. It is this acquaintance with practical detail, this filling in of all essential surroundings that help to give the novels their convincing air of realism.
You would not suspect such broad and deep knowledge of humanity and the affairs of the world in the quiet, soft-spoken, grey-eyed, dreamy, very feminine person you discover the author to be when you meet her. At a little distance, too, with her slight figure and bobbed hair, you might take her for a mere school-girl. Little more than a school-girl she was when she wrote her first novel, “The Tramping Methodist,” which, after being rejected half a dozen times, was published in 1909. She had no further difficulties with publishers, however, for this and her second book, “Starbrace,” next year, put her on sure ground with critics and public, though she had to wait for the beginnings of popularity until “Tamarisk Town” came out in 1919.
She was born at Hastings, her father being a doctor there, and has passed all her life in Sussex. Her first two novels are of the eighteenth century; one or two are of mid-Victorian times; the rest are of our own day. Occasionally she brings her people to London, but nearly always they are at home in Kent or Sussex. In “The Challenge to Sirius” and “The End of the House of Alard” they are on the borderland of the two counties; but mostly her scenes are in the county where she was born. In her books she has become its interpreter and made it her own. She has put something of her love of it and of the rugged lives and passions of its folk into the poems in “Willow Forge,” and “Saints in Sussex”; but her best poetry is in her novels. If you can compare her with some of her leading women contemporaries you have a sense of as much difference between them as there is between the collector of insects and the hunter of big game. Those others take you into a study and scientifically exhibit curious specimens under a microscope; she is too warmly human for such pendantries and takes you where there is sky and grass and a whole ordinary world full of mortal creatures and shows you them living and working in the light of common day. I believe the secret of her power is largely in her complete unselfconsciousness; she has no affectations; the charm and strength of her style is its limpid simplicity; she seems, while you read, to be merely letting her characters act and think; to be thinking of her work and never of her own cleverness; as if she were too sure and spontaneous an artist to be even aware of the fact.
RUDYARD KIPLING
Rudyard Kipling
It is usual to write of the 1890’s as the days of the decadents; but I never see them so labeled without being reminded of the Hans Brietmann ballad—
“Hans Brietmann gif a barty:
Vhere is dot barty now?”...
For though Wilde and Beardsley remain, the rest of their hectic group have either gone home or are going, and, from this distance it is possible to focus that decade and realize that its prevailing influences were Henley and Stevenson, and that the true glory of the 90’s is that they were the flowering time of Shaw, Barrie, Wells and Kipling.
Kipling, indeed, began his literary career in the 80’s, and by the end of the 90’s was the most popular, the most belauded and decried of living authors. After being sent home to Westward Ho! in Devon, to be educated at the school he has immortalized in “Stalkey & Co.,” he went back to India (where he was born in 1865), and served successively on the staffs of the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette and the Allahabad Pioneer from 1882 to 1889. The satirical verses, sketches of native character, stories of Anglo-Indian life, with their intriguings and their shrewd understandings of the shabbier side of human nature, that he contributed to those papers between the age of seventeen and twenty-five, rather justified Barrie’s dictum that he was “born blasé.” But when they were collected into his first eight or nine small books—“Departmental Ditties,” “Plain Tales from the Hills,” “In Black and White,” “Soldiers Three,” “Under the Deodars,” and the rest—they capped an instant boom in India with an even more roaring success in England and America. The vogue of the shilling shocker was then in its infancy, and Kipling’s insignificant looking drab-covered booklets competed triumphantly with that showy ephemeral fiction on our bookstalls for the suffrage of the railway traveller. From the start, like Dickens, he was no pet of a select circle but appealed to the crowd. While his contemporaries, the daintier decadents, issued their more perishable preciosities in limited editions elegantly bound, he carelessly flung his pearls before swine, and the maligned swine recognized that they were pearls before the critics began to tell them so.